Inside Legacy eSports’ Gaming House

Last week, Professional League of Legends team Legacy Esports officially opened their gaming house, a joint venture with ASUS Australia. Housing the core five members of the team, the house will function as a living space and base of operations for the team as they compete in the two splits of the 2016 Oceanic Pro League.

While gaming houses themselves aren’t totally new to the Australian esports scene (Hellions Esports recently opened one of their own), this level of corporate sponsorship surely is. This is the first gaming house ASUS have opened internationally, quite the badge of honour for the Australian team.The ASUS ROG Gaming House is a joint venture, funded in part by ASUS and in part by Legacy themselves, with money coming from their Riot match fees. ASUS also provides products to the team, decking out the house with gaming PC’s and laptops for the players to train on.

The two story house appears small from the outside but is actually quite roomy for the five players inhabiting it. The main living area has plenty of room despite having a full five computer set up in it, and the lounge room has been converted to a streaming centre which makes use of the NBN installed in the area.

Upstairs the players bedrooms are adorned with a small plaque showing of their summoner name and position in the Legacy line up. It’s a nice place with a good vibe for training, with room for the players to still have their own space when they need it.

ASUS also had a number of their upcoming gaming-centric products on display in the house. While models like the ASUS ROG G751 and ROG G501 are certainly impressive gaming laptops, the star of the show was definitely their upcoming water-cooled gaming laptop, the ROG GX700.

Boasting some pretty serious specs, this laptop is a powerhouse in its own right, but it can also be docked on the water-cooling base, promising to deliver a much greater performance from the internal hardware. As you can imagine, this tech means the laptop is a little bigger than normal, but it still has quite a slim form factor, and the docking port is fairly unobtrusive.

Local pricing and stockists are yet to be announced, but it’s fair to assume the ROG GX700 will set you back quite a bit.

The introduction of this gaming house coupled with ASUS’ sponsorship is a pretty big deal in the Australian esports scene – and even more impressively, it’s showing in Legacy’s performance. While Legacy have always been a strong team in the League of Legends OPL, since moving into the house a month ago the team has undefeated in the first split of 2016. The players echoed this sentiment when I spoke to them, seeing it as a huge advantage for the coming year.

Other teams will probably see this improvement too. It’s highly likely we’ll see more gaming houses begin to emerge in Australia because in the coming years because, in the words of Carbon,” if you don’t have some sort of set up like this, you just won’t be able to keep up”.